Apple's Fusion Drive: Faster Performance in a Simple Consumer-Focused Package

Wow, TLDToday is on MacRumors now! That is why he is my favorite tech channel on YouTube.

PeterQVenkman said:

I'm talking about software failure, not hardware.

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Maybe I'd have "got it" if you would have said that in the first place, your posts were ambiguous (and still are, you didn't say how the problem got fixed).

Sure, there's the possibility that a FD drive has some sort of software problem and doesn't work even though all the hardware is fine. Not that anyone has reported that yet. But if you're going to talk about imagining hypothetical problems, the same thing can happen with a single drive where the hardware is fine but a problem is caused by software.

Of course, if my fusion drive fails on a $2000 iMac, I can't open it up to replace it without voiding the warranty, either.

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If it's under warranty, Apple should replace a failed drive (or whatever they need to do to fix the problem). And if a single conventional drive fails on that same mac, how is the situation any different? If opening and replacing voids the warranty, it's irrelevant whether you're doing it to replace a hard drive formatted on its own or a drive formatted as part of FD.

Now I want a step-by-step guide to put a 128GB SSD into my 13inch MacBook Pro by replacing my optical drive and turning on the "Fusion". Actually, if I'm going to do it, I guess I'd want 256GB SSD!

My MacBook Pro is from mid-2012 with 2.9 GHz i7 and feels like it's crawling compared to my 1.8 GHz i7 MacBook Air 2011(2010?). At more than 50% faster seeming slower has to be the drive speed, right? The MBP even has 8GB RAM vs. 4GB in the Air.

Gary

Rocketman said:

For a decade now on Mac Rumors (with only occasional banning) I have been saying RAMDISC, RAMDISC, RAMDISC. Fusion drive brings as close of a functionality Apple is likely to mass-produce. A Flash + HDD (both commodities) solution.

Good enough, but it's not a RAMDRIVE!!

Rocketman

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RAM disks are pointless on modern operating systems. All unused ram blocks will be used to cache the disk so it makes more sense to keep them free for that rather than using a RAM disk.

deconstruct60 said:

The 3rd party storage drives are not as much of a $/perf problem as the two additional I/O cards being used in addition to the drives.

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You got me there. This is the first benchmark I've seen of the home-rolled option, and it looks like they used sata III drives/cards to do it. My guess is that they did that to match the sata III speeds in the Mac Mini (the Mac Pro they tested with only has support for sata II speeds). I bet they could match the speeds of the factory option if they were to drop an SSD and HDD in a 2011/12 Mac Mini, which both support sata III. Perhaps we'll see that test in the near future.

ThisIsNotMe said:

Slow for what, browsing the internet, writing the occasional word file, having a medium sized iPhoto/iTunes library?

LOL - You obviously don't understand the iMac or Mac Mini target market.

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Well, being that the iMac in so many ways IS the fastest Mac solution you can buy, and the Mac market in general is the market of professional designers, video editors, etc. YOU obviously don't understand the market. The iMac is for the time being until Apple actually decides there will be another desktop called PRO, their professional face.

But that said, professionals don't actually care how big the internal is, or how fast. It's pretty silly to rely on an internal drive for speed or data reliance. You need a raid for either. A raid 5 is a good start. Or if you're just worried about data backup then a mirrored raid is simple enough.

Mr-Stabby said:

While the Fusion Drive is certainly a fast option, i think everybody is forgetting that the iMac and the Mac Mini do not come with this option by default. It is a £200 upgrade. And what's more, the drive that it DOES come with (even the high spec iMacs come with this drive by default) is a pathetically slow (as we can see in the video on this article) 5400rpm drive. Apple should have put a 128gb SSD in the iMacs at least by default, but instead they've actually put in a drive that's a lot slower than the model it replaced. I'm not paying £200 extra on top of the already overpriced iMac to get a drive that performs the way a 2012 iMac should do. Sorry rant over.

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Good in theory but this would have put up the cost of the base model further while reducing the storage by 75%! Most base model iMac customer wouldn't like that.

aplnub said:

Anyone know how to make one of these yet? Do I just put in an SSD drive with a MacSales second bay option and Raid it?

Is anyone selling these type of drives yet?

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Yes. There's guides online (on my phone so can't easily link right now, just Google it). I added an SSD into my Mini yesterday and created a 1.12TB Fusion drive by hand. Loving it. Tested it out and works as expected, keeping 4GB free on the SSD (apparently). You can see it moving the data around. Pretty slick and the machine operates as if its an SSD only. Very very nice. (I did it on a new 2012 Mini i7, just didn't want to pay extra for it from Spple when I had an OWC 6G 128GB laying around anyway.)

I know everyone likes to poo-poo the Mac mini, but the latest generation of these seem like they are really great little workhorses. I'm not only going to replace my living room/media Mac mini with one of these, but I'm probably going to put another one in my music studio to run Login/Protools with my FireWire audio interfaces.

Too bad they didn't take the time to compare the performance of the Fusion drive against a straight SSD configuration.

Simple and consumer-focused? Nope. Once I get my hands on an SSD, my 2008 Mac Pro is going to have a "Fusion drive".

That's funny!
Something like this I created already 20 yrs ago. Ok, not using a SSD and a 1TB drive but a normal hard disk and an optical disk as secondary (cheaper/slower) storage.

With the new shrunk iMac internals, am I right in thinking that the 5400rpm drive is due to it being downsized to a 2.5" laptop HDD vs the previous 7200rpm 3.5" HDD?

I'm thinking that Joe Average would not see a big speed did between 5400 v 7200, but they would notice a drop in capacity to just 750GB.

QCassidy352 said:

I guess the issue is that you've now doubled the chances of failure because if either of two drives fail, they both fail.

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SSD failure rates are much lower than HDD ones. Overall, the failure rate for a Fusion might be significantly less than for a HDD alone (since the HDD will be used less) but greater than for an SSD alone.

This is clearly a good way of doing things. Apple needs to pounce. The other guys don't have it yet. Apple can make power and performance its signature in laptops if it does that.

This tech needs to be in the rMBP ASAP.

For me I would pay the extra $250 every time. After using an SSD in my air I couldn't go back.

But on all the models you have to buy the "second tier" model which pushes it up around $200-$300 which is a bit too much for a CPU upgrade IMO.

iGrip said:

This is clearly a good way of doing things. Apple needs to pounce. The other guys don't have it yet. Apple can make power and performance its signature in laptops if it does that.

This tech needs to be in the rMBP ASAP.

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rMBPs are too thin for a standard 2.5" HDD, hence the proprietary "Blade" SSD.

This tech can not be in the rMBP.

Santabean2000 said:

With the new shrunk iMac internals, am I right in thinking that the 5400rpm drive is due to it being downsized to a 2.5" laptop HDD vs the previous 7200rpm 3.5" HDD?

I'm thinking that Joe Average would not see a big speed did between 5400 v 7200, but they would notice a drop in capacity to just 750GB.

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Maybe not true. I definitely noticed the speed difference when I replace the 5400 RPM drives in my MBP and mini with 7200RPM models.

It only took me 3 days to break fusion drive.

I bought a quad core i7 2.6ghz with 1TB + Fusion Drive which I've been using since it landed on Tuesday.

I created a 200GB partition in disk utility to store my photo (aperture/lightroom) libraries on, then after realizing I dont necessarily need to partition since my internal drive is so large, i tried deleting the partition using disk utility. Well that somehow must have thrown fusion drive into a tizzy, because I got an error message that I can not delete a boot partition (this wasnt a boot partition) and now I am unable to recover the free space that is left (the partition was indeed deleted, and I am now left with 291GB [where did the extra 91gb come from, my guess is Fusion Drive] of unusable, unaccessible, un-deletable free space).

If it's so sensitive to user action, perhaps disk utility should either be disabled, or come with some severe warnings that it may affect the performance of fusion drive.

crap.

Santabean2000 said:

With the new shrunk iMac internals, am I right in thinking that the 5400rpm drive is due to it being downsized to a 2.5" laptop HDD vs the previous 7200rpm 3.5" HDD?

I'm thinking that Joe Average would not see a big speed did between 5400 v 7200, but they would notice a drop in capacity to just 750GB.

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They make 2.5" 7200rpm laptop drives.

PeterQVenkman said:

This means that, like Time Machine, when it works it is invisible and beautiful. When there is an issue, there will be jack one can do about it.

I may get it on a mini.

Edit: dangit, only on the core i7 model, which pushes it above $1000.

I'll put it in an SSD myself.

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I did and this is how got Fusion working:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1486384/

Amazing Iceman said:

UPDATE: The Mac Mini only comes with Intel Graphics 4000, which in my opinion is junk. I would prefer nVidia or ATI with dedicated video memory...

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Are you surprised? The Mini is junk. Pure and simple.

re oronginal article

as darth vader says to young luke skywalker during the light saber duel - "impressive..."

Small White Car said:

He's right. Shipping the basic iMac with just a 5400 rpm hard drive is a bit shameful.

I think using 5400 with Fusion is a good compromise. It seems to work out well from what I'm reading. But a basic hard-drive-only iMac can only serve to tarnish Apple's reputation, I think, as people go home with brand new iMacs that perform like old laptops.

They really should have put faster drives in those basic systems. Not everyone needs Fusion...a hard-drive-only system is fine...but there should be some level of standards so long as Apple's not actually selling $600 computers.

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It's best to judge this build after having had used it. It does seem to be on the slow side. But would Apple make junk?

Besides, sometimes slower is actually faster:

http://blog.macsales.com/11825-when-slower-is-actually-faster

eyehop said:

Nice, but it seems temporary. All SSD for all files is the way to go, and will be feasible before too long.

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Only when you could buy a 1TB SSD for 90 bucks.

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I am using my i7 2.6 Fusion drive Mac Mini. It flys everything is super snappy.

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iGrip said:

Are you surprised? The Mini is junk. Pure and simple.

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Junk how? Its a bad ass miniature powerhouse. Tiny, silent and fast as heck and consumes little power. I do quite a bit on it and it has no performance issues. Loads up my Trading software lightning fast,crunches through multiple (Complex Order books,etc.. like a hot knife on butter) I got A bunch of applications,trading software,etc.. even an Ubuntu Virtual running all fast.

Also I have a Million windows open and animations are smooth as butter when using my magic trackpad to manipulate stuff.

So far 5 days 4h runtime on this sucker. (would have been much longer but had to shut down to move power cable)

hugodrax said:

Junk how? Its a bad ass miniature powerhouse. Tiny, silent and fast as heck and consumes little power. I do quite a bit on it and it has no performance issues. Loads up my Trading software lightning fast,crunches through multiple (Complex Order books,etc.. like a hot knife on butter) I got A bunch of applications,trading software,etc.. even an Ubuntu Virtual running all fast.

Also I have a Million windows open and animations are smooth as butter when using my magic trackpad to manipulate stuff.

So far 5 days 4h runtime on this sucker. (would have been much longer but had to shut down to move power cable)

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Just don't create and delete a partition on it. Have to take mine in tomorrow, likely for a replacement.